What I Know About People Now That I'm in My Mid-Thirties

Nobody teaches you this. You just collect the scars.

I used to think I was bad at relationships.

That the loneliness I felt in a room full of people was a personal failure. That if I just found the right group, the right friends, the right circle — the emptiness would stop.

It didn't.

What I've come to understand, slowly and sometimes painfully, is that most of what I believed about people was wrong. Not because I was naive. Because nobody tells you the truth about this stuff until you've already lived it.

So here it is. Ten things I know now that I didn't know then.

One Good Person Can Change Your Life. One Wrong Person Can Destroy It.

We spend enormous energy trying to avoid bad experiences. We should spend more of it choosing who we let close.

The people in your life aren't just company. They're environment. And environment shapes everything — your ambition, your self-worth, your baseline sense of what's possible. One person who believes in you can rewrite years of damage. One person who doesn't can quietly undo everything you've built.

Choose carefully. Then choose again.

More People Doesn't Mean More Happiness

At some point I started confusing a full calendar with a full life.

The math doesn't work the way you'd expect. Double the people, double the noise — but the warmth doesn't scale. What does scale is friction. Expectation. The performance of being okay in front of people who aren't really watching.

The happiest periods of my life have been small. A few people. Real ones.

Most People Are Indifferent to Your Joy. Almost None Are Indifferent to Your Pain.

This one took me a long time to accept because it's uncomfortable.

Tell someone good news — a promotion, a milestone, something you worked hard for — and watch the room. The response is polite. Measured. Sometimes it's competitive.

Tell someone you're struggling. Suddenly there's interest. Attention. A certain kind of energy that wasn't there before.

I don't think most people are malicious. I think they're just human. But knowing this changes how much you perform your happiness for an audience.

Close Enough to Hurt. Far Enough to Ache.

There's no distance from other people that's completely comfortable.

Get close — and you hand them the ability to wound you in ways strangers can't. Pull back — and the quiet starts to feel like something's missing.

I used to think this was a problem to solve. I don't anymore. This is just what it is to be a person among other people. The tension doesn't go away. You just get better at holding it.

You Are Only Fully Yourself When You're Alone

In company, even good company, there's always a version of you that's performing.

Not dishonestly. Not dramatically. Just — adjusted. Calibrated to the room. Softer here, sharper there. More agreeable than you actually feel.

Alone, that stops. The voice in your head is just yours. No audience. No management. No translation required.

If that voice makes you uncomfortable — that's not a reason to fill the silence. That's a reason to sit with it longer.

You Won't Know Who Matters Until Things Fall Apart

The people who show up when your life is working tell you very little.

It's easy to be present for someone who's fine. There's no cost to it. What you learn about people — what you learn about yourself — only becomes clear when something actually goes wrong.

I'm not grateful for the hard periods. But I'm clear-eyed about what they showed me. About who stayed, who disappeared, and who I thought would do the opposite of what they did.

Pay attention when things are difficult. That's the only real information.

The People You Meet While Lonely Will Hurt You. The People You Lean On While Broken Will Betray You.

This sounds harsh. I've found it to be true.

When you're lonely, your judgment about people is impaired. You're selecting for presence, not quality. Anyone who shows up feels like relief.

When you're broken, you need someone to hold the weight. But people who accept that role often don't know how to give it back — or eventually resent carrying it.

This isn't an argument against connection. It's an argument for doing the work to be okay enough to choose clearly, instead of just gratefully.

If You Can't Be Alone, You Can't Really Be With Anyone

The person who can't tolerate their own company will take whatever company they can get. They'll stay in rooms they should leave. Relationships that have run their course. Conversations that drain them — because the alternative is silence.

Learning to be alone — genuinely okay with it, not just white-knuckling it — is one of the most underrated skills I know. It makes every relationship you do choose voluntary. And voluntary is the only kind that's worth anything.

Celebrate Alone. Grieve Alone.

Not because others don't care. Some do.

But the good things that happen to you are yours. The weight of what's hard is yours. Outsourcing both too freely — looking for someone to validate the joy, someone to carry the grief — builds a dependency that makes you fragile.

Feel it yourself first. All of it. Then share if you want to.

Everyone Puts Themselves First. So Should You.

This is the one that used to make me feel guilty.

The truth is, everyone — including the people you love most, including the people who love you — is operating from a position of self-interest at some level. That's not cynicism. That's biology.

The mistake isn't other people looking out for themselves. The mistake is you not doing the same — and then being surprised, repeatedly, when the math doesn't work in your favor.

You are allowed to be your own priority. You are, in fact, the only one guaranteed to be.

The Thread Through All of This

I'm not someone who stopped believing in people.

I still think one right person can change the direction of a life. I still think depth beats breadth, always. I still think the moments that matter most happen between people, not in the absence of them.

But I stopped expecting people to be something other than human. Inconsistent. Distracted. Mostly focused on their own survival, as they should be.

When I stopped expecting otherwise — the disappointments got quieter. The good moments got sharper. The people who stayed felt like something chosen, not just something that happened.

That's not a sad conclusion. That's just a clear one.

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— The Andes